Anthropic and the Claude Models

Overview

Anthropic, the second-largest AI vendor after OpenAI, has developed a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models can perform various tasks, including captioning images, writing emails, and solving math and coding challenges.

Keeping Track of Claude Models

With Anthropic’s model ecosystem growing rapidly, it can be challenging to keep track of the capabilities of different Claude models. To assist users, a guide has been created and will be updated as new models and upgrades are released.

Claude Models

Claude models are named after literary works of art: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. The latest models include:

• Claude 3 Haiku: A lightweight model.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet: A midrange model.
• Claude 3 Opus: Anthropic’s flagship model.

Interestingly, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the “midrange” model, is currently the most capable Claude model. This may change with the upcoming release of Claude 3.5 Opus.

Capabilities

All Claude models can analyze text, images, charts, graphs, and technical diagrams. They feature a standard 200,000-token context window and can follow multistep instructions, use tools (e.g., stock ticker trackers), and produce structured output in formats like JSON.

A context window refers to the amount of data a model can analyze before generating new data, while tokens are subdivided bits of raw data. Two hundred thousand tokens are approximately equivalent to 150,000 words or a 600-page novel.

Internet Access Limitations

Unlike many major generative AI models, Anthropic’s Claude models cannot access the internet, making them less effective at answering questions about current events. They also cannot generate images, only simple line diagrams.

Model Performance

In terms of performance, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is faster than Claude 3 Opus and better at understanding nuanced and complex instructions. Claude 3 Haiku, while the quickest of the three, struggles with sophisticated prompts.

Claude Model Pricing

The Claude models are available through Anthropic’s API and managed platforms such as Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Here’s the pricing for the Anthropic API:

• Claude 3 Haiku: 25 cents per million input tokens (~750,000 words), or $1.25 per million output tokens.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet: $3 per million input tokens, or $15 per million output tokens.
• Claude 3 Opus: $15 per million input tokens, or $75 per million output tokens.

Anthropic also offers prompt caching and batching to provide additional runtime savings. Prompt caching allows developers to store specific “prompt contexts” for reuse across API calls, while batching processes asynchronous groups of low-priority model inference requests.

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Claude Plans and Apps

For individual users and companies looking to interact with the Claude models via web, Android, and iOS apps, Anthropic offers a free Claude plan with rate limits and other usage restrictions. Upgrading to a subscription plan removes these limits and unlocks new functionality. The current plans include:

• Claude Pro: $20 per month, offering 5x higher rate limits, priority access, and previews of upcoming features.
• Claude Team: $30 per user per month, designed for small businesses, includes a dashboard for billing and user management, and integrations with data repositories like Salesforce.
• Claude Enterprise: Tailored for larger companies, allowing the upload of proprietary data for analysis, with a larger context window (500,000 tokens), GitHub integration, and access to Projects and Artifacts.

Both Pro and Team subscribers receive the Projects feature, which grounds Claude’s outputs in knowledge bases, and access to Artifacts, a workspace for editing and adding to content generated by Claude.

A Word of Caution

As with all generative AI models, there are risks associated with using Claude. The models may occasionally make mistakes when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to hallucinate. They are trained on public web data, some of which may be copyrighted or under restrictive licenses. While Anthropic and other AI vendors argue that the fair-use doctrine protects them from copyright claims, this has not prevented data owners from filing lawsuits.

Anthropic offers policies to protect certain customers from legal challenges arising from fair-use issues. However, these policies do not resolve the ethical concerns surrounding the use of models trained on data without permission.